Reevely: Wynne names a Minister of 'No'

There’s nothing subtle about Premier Kathleen Wynne’s switch from the caring, optimistic, “investing” politician she was on the campaign trail to the cautious, thrifty premier she’ll have to be if she wants to have a province worth governing in four years.

There’s nothing subtle about Premier Kathleen Wynne’s switch from the caring, optimistic, “investing” politician she was on the campaign trail to the cautious, thrifty premier she’ll have to be if she wants to have a province worth governing in four years.

By naming her most trusted lieutenant, Deb Matthews, to run a newly constituted provincial treasury board — the former health minister keeps her title as deputy premier — Wynne is showing she’s as serious as she can be about holding back her government’s spending. That’s the only way to balance the provincial budget and ultimately get Ontario’s debt under control.

Ottawans will be very familiar with the work Matthews has been assigned, a job held federally by John Baird, Vic Toews, Stockwell Day and Tony Clement since 2006. It means being Minister of No. No pay increases, no service expansions beyond what’s already been promised in public. “There’s no money, so ‘No’” — over and over and over again.

In Wynne’s new cabinet, Matthews gets responsibility for labour negotiations, for the Crown corporations and agencies Wynne wants to rationalize and whose assets might go on the block, and for day-to-day expense management. Plus she takes over the open-government work previously championed by the retired John Milloy.

In other words, Matthews is the “minister of savings and accountability” New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath proposed to appoint, had she won the election.

As health minister, Matthews has presided over the one portfolio whose funding is practically untouchable — it’s up about $10 billion, or 25 per cent, since 2010. She wasn’t on the job during the spending scandal involving eHealth, but the Ornge air-ambulance service got out of hand while she was on watch.

On the other hand, she bargained hard with Ontario’s doctors in 2012, including unilaterally cutting the fees the government pays for services that technology has made easier to deliver, such as cataract surgeries and diagnostic tests. She cut what the government pays for generic prescription drugs. And she’s pushed through reforms to hospital funding to more closely link the money they get to the results they deliver.

These are the kinds of changes that need to spread across the government if the Liberals are to balance the budget by 2017, as they’ve sworn they will. Both the doctors and the pharmacists protested loudly — including in some cases refusing to fill prescriptions — and we’re in for more of that if Matthews is going to get anywhere.

Whether she has the stomach for this kind of work full-time, for having her name on protest signs all over the province, we’ll have to see. She probably won’t take to it with the joy of her Conservative federal counterparts. But the fact Wynne named her to the job, and the fact she accepted it, says that whatever they manage to do to restrain and reform, it’s going to be the best effort they can put together.

The move takes away responsibility from many cabinet members for finding savings in their ministries’ labour agreements. The new health minister, Eric Hoskins (an MD), doesn’t have to go to war with his colleagues. Experienced Education Minister Liz Sandals won’t be the face of a fight with teachers as their contracts expire this summer.

Machiavelli wrote about a deputy governor assigned to crack down on crime in a lawless province of Italy. He was harsh, but he delivered. His reward was to be cut in half and his body left in the public square by a ruler who got to enjoy both the results of his labour and the love of the people for having freed them of him.

If Matthews does her job very well indeed, and can save money while improving services, she’ll be fine. If she becomes a scapegoat for a government that, despite all of Wynne’s promises, is known for its constant battles with public-sector workers, she’ll have to watch her back.

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